The sites of towns and cities were artfully selected, near navigable
rivers and their confluences, as at Marietta, Cincinnati, and in
Kentucky opposite the old mouth of the Scioto. Points for defence were
chosen and fortified with scientific precision. The labor expended upon
these multitudinous structures must have been enormous, implying a vast
population and extensive social, economic, and civil organization. The
Cahokia mound, opposite St. Louis, is 90 feet high and 900 feet long.
The Mound-builders made elegant pottery, of various design and accurate
shapes, worked bone and all sorts of stones, and even forged copper.
There are signs that they understood smelting this metal. They certainly
mined it in large quantities, and carried it down the Mississippi
hundreds of miles from its source on Lake Superior. They must have been
masters of river navigation, but their mode of conveying vast burdens
overland, destitute of efficient draft animals as they apparently were,
we can hardly even conjecture.
The Mound-builders, as we have said, were related to the antique
populations of Mexico and Central America, and the most probable
explanation of their departure from their Northern seats is that in face
of pestilence, or of some overpowering human foe, they retreated to the
Southwest, there to lay, under better auspices, the foundations of new
states, and to develop that higher civilization whose relics, too little
known, astound the student of the past, as greatly as do the stupendous
pillars of Carnac or the grotesque animal figures of Khorsabad and
Nimrud.
So much has been written about the American Indians that we need not
discuss them at length. They were misnamed Indians by Columbus, who
supposed the land he had discovered to be India. At the time of his
arrival not more than two hundred thousand of them lived east of the
Mississippi, though they were doubtless far more numerous West and
South. Whence they came, or whether, if this was a human deed at all,
they or another race now extinct drove out the Mound-builders, none can
tell.
Of arts the red man had but the rudest. He made wigwams, canoes, bone
fish-hooks with lines of hide or twisted bark, stone tomahawks,
arrow-heads and spears, clothing of skins, wooden bows, arrows, and
clubs. He loved fighting, finery, gambling, and the chase. He
domesticated no animals but the dog and possibly the hog. Sometimes
brave, he was oftener treacherous, cruel, revengeful. His power of
endurance on the trail or the warpath was incredible, and if captured,
he let himself be tortured to death without a quiver or a cry. Though
superstitious, he believed in a Great Spirit to be worshipped without
idols, and in a future life of happy hunting and feasting.
Whether, at the time of which we now speak, the Indians were an old
race, already beginning to decline, or a fresh race, which contact with
the whites balked of its development, it is difficult to say. Their
career since best accords with the former supposition. In either case we
may assume that their national groupings and habitats were nearly the
same in 1500 as later, when these became accurately known. In the
eighteenth century the Algonquins occupied all the East from Nova Scotia
to North Carolina, and stretched west to the Mississippi. At one time
they numbered ninety thousand. The Iroquois or Five Nations had their
seat in Central and Western New York. North and west of them lived the
Hurons or Wyandots. The Appalachians, embracing Cherokees, Creeks,
Choctaws, Chickasaws, Seminoles and a number of lesser tribes, occupied
all the southeastern portion of what is now the United States. West of
the Mississippi were the Dakotas or Sioux.
Since the white man's arrival upon these shores, very few changes have
occurred among the brute inhabitants of North America. A few species, as
the Labrador duck and the great auk, have perished. America then
possessed but four animals which had appreciable economic value; the
dog, the reindeer at the north, which the Mound-builders used as a
draft animal but the Indians did not, and the llama and the paco south
of the equator. Every one of our present domestic animals originated
beyond the Atlantic, being imported hither by our ancestors. The Indians
of the lower Mississippi Valley, when De Soto came, had dogs, and also
what the Spaniards called hogs, perhaps peccaries, but neither brute was
of any breed now bred in the country. A certain kind of dogs were native
also to the Juan Fernandez and the Falkland Islands.
Mr. Edward John Payne is doubtless correct in maintaining, in his
"History of the New World called America," that the backwardness of the
American aborigines was largely due to their lack of animals suitable
for draft or travel or producing milk or flesh good for food. From the
remotest antiquity Asiatics had the horse, ass, ox and cow, camel and
goat–netting ten times the outfit in useful animals which the
Peruvians, Mexicans, or Indians enjoyed.
The vegetable kingdom of Old America was equally restricted, which also
helps explain its low civilization. At the advent of the Europeans the
continent was covered with forests. Then, though a few varieties may
have since given out and some imported ones run wild, the undomesticated
plants and trees were much as now. Not so the cultivated kinds. The
Indians were wretched husbandmen, nor had the Mound-builders at all the
diversity of agricultural products so familiar to us. Tobacco, Indian
corn, cocoa, sweet potatoes, potatoes, the custard apple, the Jerusalem
artichoke, the guava, the pumpkin and squash, the papaw and the
pineapple, indigenous to North America, had been under cultivation here
before Columbus came, the first four from most ancient times. The manioc
or tapioca-plant, the red-pepper plant, the marmalade plum, and the
tomato were raised in South America before 1500. The persimmon, the
cinchona tree, millet, the Virginia and the Chili strawberry are natives
of this continent, but have been brought under cultivation only within
the last three centuries.
The four great cereals, wheat, rye, oats, and rice, constituting all our
main food crops but corn, have come to us from Europe. So have cherries,
quinces, and pears, also hops, currants, chestnuts, and mushrooms. The
banana, regarded by von Humboldt as an original American fruit, modern
botanists derive from Asia. With reference to apples there may be some
question. Apples of a certain kind flourished in New England so early
after the landing of the Pilgrims that it is difficult to suppose the
fruit not to have been indigenous to this continent. Champlain, in
1605 or 1606, found the Indians about the present sites of Portland,
Boston, and Plymouth in considerable agricultural prosperity, with
fields of corn and tobacco, gardens rich in melons, squashes, pumpkins,
and beans, the culture of none of which had they apparently learned from
white men. Mr. Payne's generalization, that superior food-supply
occasioned the Old World's primacy in civilization, and also that of the
Mexicans and Peruvians here, seems too sweeping, yet it evidently
contains large truth.